DOWNTOWN — They say your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness.
And Rahm Emanuel is living proof of that.
Sure, he can rub people the wrong way or talk when he should listen.
The mayor owned up to that …
Those are lines from Mayor Emanuel's infamous campaign commercial I like to call, "The One With The Sweater."
It’s the one where Rahm, humble in a purple sweater, speaks directly into the camera, admits he can be a jerk — and a bossy one at that — but says we should elect him anyway because he’s got the city’s best interests at heart.
He promised to be better if we just gave him one more chance.
And it worked: Chicago voted him back in office.
That commercial came to mind Thursday morning for a couple reasons.
The rowdy town hall budget meeting that sent the mayor fleeing for his safety in South Shore, for one.
A crowd of angry folks protesting the closure of Dyett High School at a town hall budget meeting particularly wanted Rahm to stop talking and start listening because, and I’m paraphrasing here, he’s really rubbing them the wrong way.
Then, the Sun-Times and Tribune had stories — a more cynical guy than me might call the reports early editions of mayoral press releases — announcing what for a lot of homeowners might as well be the end of the world: the mayor’s plan to unleash a $500 million property tax hike, a $100 million garbage collection fee and a host of other taxes on the city to pick up the tab for unfunded pension payments that have the city on the brink of financial disaster.
The fact that Emanuel was out “listening” to the people’s ideas on how to solve the city’s financial woes while his City Hall spin machine was secretly talking to handpicked reporters about what he plans to do about it regardless of what the people have to say seemed like an interesting coincidence.
So I called Emanuel’s challenger in the mayoral election, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, to get his take on the mayor’s approach to handling Chicago’s pension problem.
Garcia said it just shows that Rahm hasn’t changed one bit — no matter what he said to save face during the campaign.
“After the public hearing charade the last two nights it's clear the mayor has made up his mind and it indicates that nothing has changed with the new Rahm,” the Cook County commissioner said Thursday.
“He’s not listening. He’s certainly not leveling with people when he has hearings and simultaneously putting out in the papers what’s going to be the bad medicine."
If Emanuel started listening to people, like he suggested he would during the campaign, he might make reforms to the city's tax structure rather than just pick property taxpayers' pockets to fill the pension funding gap, his former challenger said.
"He's closing a $750 million deficit with all new revenue. Where's the commitment to restructuring government? He's kicking the can down the road again," Garcia said. "For the most part his overall financial thrust has been played. All that’s left is whether he’s going to pare down things to make it look like he reconsidered some matters.”
Some of what Garcia is saying you might expect from a guy who came up short in the polls, but he brings up a good point.
What the mayor did this week was tip his hand a bit. He's sticking with a familiar political strategy that relies on controlling political messaging to capitalize on a serious crisis, which is something Emanuel — famously ripping off a line from Winston Churchill — has said should never “go to waste.”
It’s textbook Rahm. And we’ve seen it before.
Here’s how it works, and what Chicagoans should probably expect from the mayor's administration in the weeks leading to a City Council vote on the city's budget.
In order for the strategy to work, you need a legitimate crisis. It helps if the crisis involves complicated problem that most folks don’t easily understand and needs to be solved with great urgency.
For instance, the auto industry is going belly up, the big banks need a bailout, the Chicago Public Schools are broke or, in this case, unfunded public pensions have a major city on the brink of bankruptcy.
Once you have a worthy crisis it’s important to control the message, which at the beginning is always the same: THE END IS NEAR.
Consider how the Emanuel administration handled the Great CPS School-Closing Crisis of 2013.
The year began with Emanuel’s administration announcing as many as 330 “underutilized” Chicago public schools might have to be closed to close the failing school system's $1 billion budget gap.
A lot of people, especially parents and Chicago Teachers Union members, nearly lost their minds.
Emanuel then swiftly moved on to the next step in capitalizing on a serious crisis: Calm mass hysteria by giving the appearance of ultimate leadership and compassion, while leaving a serious unsolved problem with dire consequences still on the table.
The Emanuel administration accomplished this by reducing the number of schools on the chopping block to 129 and rolled out what former CPS boss Barbara Byrd-Bennett called the “next level of communication,” a series of public hearings aimed to get public input about potential school closings.
What followed over the next several weeks were hours of public testimony, protests, rallies and marches aimed at convincing Mayor Emanuel to reconsider the plan for the biggest school closing in American history.
At this point in the crisis capitalization strategy the political leader must show resolve that despite the harsh consequences his plan to solve the crisis is the right one — the only one — that can save us all from impending doom.
This takes a particular set of skills including “staying on message,” which in Emanuel’s case requires saying the same things over an over and over again.
When it came to school closings the mayor stuck to a script of talking points about his “responsibility” as mayor and “an adult” to make sure Chicago school kids got a good education and that going through with a mass school closing was “necessary” to solve the crisis.
The aim is get people to believe you care about what people want and that you’ve actually listened to their concerns.
That’s the point in the CPS drama that the number of schools facing certain death was narrowed to about 50, still too many for the angry crowd but as one political insider put it “a manufactured sign of good faith.”
During this time, a leader must have patience, a willingness to take criticism and make efforts to appear strong willed — or as Emanuel put it more than once, “It’s in the valley that your character gets revealed, not at the peak” — while the clock slowly ticks closer to Doomsday.
Then, in the midnight hour, just before the serious crisis is painfully averted, the political strategy for capitalizing on it crescendos with a show of unexpected mercy — an olive branch to the people — that aims to lessen the blow.
It’s like throwing the ball into the stands after a game-winning touchdown.
In 2013, Emanuel didn’t disappoint.
Before the final vote on school closings, his handpicked school board, acting on the mayor's recommendation, announced that four schools on the chopping block would remain open.
In the end, Chicago closed the most schools in American history and the damage — especially to Emanuel’s approval rating — wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
For Emanuel, it was another serious crisis that he didn’t let go to waste.
You could say that’s always been the mayor’s greatest strength.
Maybe Rahm should remember what they say about that.
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